For These Doctors, the Frontlines Are in Operating Rooms and Clinics

Erin Wilson

Right now, Dr. Ahmed and Dr. Mohammad are in an operating room in Iraq, preparing a little girl named Adyan for heart surgery. The room, impeccably clean, is buzzing with activity. Local doctors are working alongside our international team of pediatric heart specialists, all doing their work with one goal in mind—saving the life of this girl.

Right now, doctors in east Mosul are seeing patients in clinics you helped to renovate. These doctors are taking care of families who went years without regular medical care while living under ISIS occupation. In many ways, the doctors and their patients are all trying to make up for lost time.

Right now, doctors in Dream City, in the Mosul corridor, are seeing patients in a tent-clinic you helped to establish for displaced families living in an unfinished housing development. These doctors are busy stitching up cuts, seeing to pregnant mamas and new babies, and caring for patients with diabetes and high blood pressure. If their elderly patients can’t make their way over the dusty, rutted road to the clinic, the doctors make a house call.

Health care in stable countries is complicated enough. Health care in countries like Iraq, ravaged by cycles of war, is extra complicated.

Hospitals and clinics in places like Mosul were bombed. Their doctors killed for not joining the ISIS cause. Displaced families moved to remote locations that were safe, but had no infrastructure. In some parts of the country, health care professionals work for months without pay. And the generations-long cost of war shows up in babies with heart defects, leaving thousands of children in need of surgery.

When you become a doctor in Iraq, you don’t expect to have an easy life. Doctors in Iraq could choose to leave and work in a country with higher incomes, stable electricity, and no war. But they don’t. They stay and work to make life better for their people.

The doctors that are performing heart surgeries, delivering babies, taking care of decades-long illnesses, and sitting at the bedside of elderly patients today—they are caring for thousands of lives.

It’s National Doctor Day today. We could hardly let this day pass without showing you some of the people you’re empowering to make changes that last a lifetime and beyond.

Our monthly sponsors make lasting change, like this, possible. Their ongoing support provides the steady finances we need to plan major medical missions, train doctors, and staff clinics. Their dependable support is also what allows us to meet emergency needs when they arise—like ambulances and mobile medical clinics for families fleeing Aleppo.

Thank you for showing up at the front lines of crisis—whether it’s in a hospital, a tent clinic, or a renovated medical center in the middle of a conflict zone. Thank you for saving lives and helping others do the same.

Empower local doctors and nurses to save lives and meet needs in their own country. Become a monthly sponsor.